Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

Ron “King Suki” King won the U.S. checkers championship in June in Medina, Ohio, claiming the $6,000 first prize by emerging from a field of 41 competitors whose intensity generally rivals that of more popular and complex games. King, the world “free style” champion, is known as the Muhammad Ali of checkers for trash-talking his opponents. Also competing was another world champion (in a form of checkers in which the first three moves are always at random), Alex “The Mad Russian” Moiseyev, who assured an Agence France-Presse reporter that, as in chess, the top players have to think 10 moves ahead.

In May, just after bird flu was discovered in Ivory Coast, hundreds of young people flocked to Abidjan’s night clubs to taunt the disease with a new dance imitating a chicken in the throes of death, according to a Reuters dispatch (“leaning backward, shaking (the) wrists, arms and legs … with a loud clucking sound”).

As volcanologists warned of the possible eruption of Indonesia’s Mount Merapi in May, nearby farmers continued to listen instead to the mountain’s spirits and to continue their rituals and offerings to ward off an eruption, according to an NBC News report. In one region, to preserve the mountain’s tranquility, men “gather naked in groups late at night and run in circles around their villages.”(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD

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